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Someday

Maybe someday we'll be able to feed Master of Magic to an AI and say, "Make something like this with better graphics and more units and spells." I think that's the only way we'll ever get a true successor to the game, since all human attempts thus far have been ruined in some way or another.

In the past, I've thought about remaking the game. I absolutely love Master of Magic and would love to have a native version of it for Windows. But... I don't think it's something I necessarily want to start on my own, and it would likely be done using the original graphics. But at least it would be a 32-bit native Windows app with a larger map (and larger view of it on screen) and multiplayer support over TCP/IP. And I'd write it in C++.

Maybe someday we'll be able to feed Master of Magic to an AI and say, "Make something like this with better graphics and more units and spells." I think that's the only way we'll ever get a true successor to the game, since all human attempts thus far have been ruined in some way or another.

I've been playing with the original MoM graphics, and I've got a small C++ app that loads in some data and renders several unit groups to the window. Fang and the great drake are animated (not that you can tell from the screen shot, obviously), and all the movement frames and animations seem to run correctly as you move units around the screen. You can't attack anything, but I hooked up the A* algorithm so at least units move around each other (and around the wizard tower).

On my own, this is probably about as far as I'm going to go. I don't understand the combat mechanics well enough to even begin prototyping that stuff. I also don't know how to generate MoM-like worlds, so any prototyping on the overland maps is also more than I want to do on my own.

But... If anyone wants to help and can contribute some coding for combat or world/map generation, then that just might be enough to motivate me to continue working on this!

On a related note, I've been thinking about prototyping the intro animation for MoM. I have the animation frames, the music, and the lightning and fireball effect sounds. I don't have the voices from Tauron and Merlin. I ran a utility years ago to extract everything from the LBX files, but the voices didn't pop out of anything. If anyone has the original WAV files for Tauron and Merlin, I'd really appreciate getting copies!

I Would love to reuse Planar Conquest and bring it up to scratch.
I used to program in turbopascal and GW Basic and the games I wrote were better than a lot of games we play nowdays... except the technology is far ahead nowadays. I used to do things like create embedded variables within a large number variable, and extract them via subroutines depending upon what was needed to save memory use. Or use some good complex formulas to develop realistic results.
I would been keen to try and do something to make MoM live again.
I thought planar conquest could do it, and it could!!, IF we were given the ability to mod it properly (ie. be able to change the AI and tweak quite a number of issues with it).
I posted many ideas on how to improve planar conquest significantly.

For example a quality of life thing is the familiars that MoM had that were specific depending upon which was your primary spell casting area, and the cut scenes that really set a scene!!

Heck I would even be interested in starting from scratch, but I am quite busy. Madocs99 is my steam ID
Anyone else??

If you're interested, we can start a joint project based on the work I've done so far. I've been thinking about separating the "business" logic out of the sample app as high-level scripts and leaving all the graphics loading and rendering in C++. I think that would create a really nice abstraction model, and then the game logic itself would be in scripts, easily understood by anyone with at least a BASIC background.

The next step for my sample app would involve defining all the stats for the units. Then I could display those unit stats in a box in the upper right corner of the view when hovering the mouse over units on the map. If you want to help me move forward with this project, then go assemble all the unit stats into some kind of object model in JSON.

Heck I would even be interested in starting from scratch, but I am quite busy. Madocs99 is my steam ID
Anyone else??

I decided to implement hover unit statistics, but that is definitely as far as I am taking this project alone. Combat mechanics would be fun to integrate, but I would need help from someone with a better understanding of how it all works. If anyone wants to help get involved, or even if you just want a binary-only copy of my demo, then send me an E-Mail. My address can be assembled as follows... Start with my user name, add an '@' symbol, add my user name again, and then add ".com" to the end. And that's my E-Mail address!